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Well, school is finally over and the grades are in. Unfortunately, spring is just about over, too. We did get a fair amount of spring gardening done, but not enough for my liking! A little bit more every year...I hope.It seems that we spent more time this spring building cages to protect the gardens than we did actually putting in the gardens themselves. Hopefully this is work that won't have to be repeated each year.
This is the biggest cage, built by James out of PVC and heavy plastic netting. It's where we planted the peas -- has to be tall to let the peas climb and also covered to keep out the birds. Pole beans will go here when the peas are done.We planted about 250 peas in here -- 125 sugar snap and 125 garden peas. We harvested about 2.5 pounds of each so far. Not really enough for freezing -- they're so good raw, so who cares -- but it's a start.
The square foot garden had a lot of cole veggies during the spring. We got one tiny broccoli (head was the size of a ping-pong ball). It looked beautiful one day, but so tiny, so I decided to leave it. Then, when we went back a few days later, it had started to turn yellow. So hard to garden when you're not there every day! Plus, we left it in the car when we got home, so no one got to try it. The chickens liked the two green caterpillars on it, though.
The pak chois were the prettiest, imo. Can't wait for fall so I can grow more. They looked so beautiful one weekend but had bolted by the next. Now I know how big they'll get (not very big) and will harvest them sooner. And plant more of them. We needed three plants to make enough for one dinner. 
(One from my garden, one from Julia's, and one from Xing Hua's.)Still in the gardens are collards (supposedly heat tolerant, thus their popularity in the South) and kale. Hope the kale doesn't bolt on us.The onions are doing well. We pulled one a week or so ago to see how they were growing. The bulb was about the size of the broccoli. Bigger than a scallion, but not quite an onion bulb. 
I think I got the lettuce and spinach in a bit too late. All the spinach bolted with just 4 leaves on the stalk. Lettuce is iffy. We did get one butterhead. Very spotty, though, and not good eating. And a bunch of radishes. But who likes radishes if there's no lettuce?My friend, Lisa, gave me gobs of lettuce from her garden. She did it right -- plant early and often! I ate salad for lunch every day for a week. Salad with her lettuce, my radishes and garden peas. And some left-over roast chicken (from Julia's 4H bird, of course.) Now that's living!
I am realizing the biggest problem with writing a gardening blog. In the winter, there was never anything interesting in the garden to write about. Now that it's spring, there is so much to write about but so little time to write!I have started lots of seedlings, which are growing under lights in the basement. I have removed last fall's leaves from my gardens and noticed new growth. (Oregano! Chives! Peppermint! Sage! Julia even picked a bunch of second-year parsley already!) But it's too early to plant much outside besides peas, greens, and cole crops.
We have done a lot this past week, though. The weather has been gorgeous -- sunny and 70s all week. I'll have to catch up a little at a time, as I can't write everything now. (Back to school. Ugh.)
Ever since I'd discovered the book Square Foot Gardening (in our Lansdowne-gardening days), I've always wanted to try actual square-foot gardening. So this year, Dana bought me the newest edition, and I am going to try a few SFGs with my smaller crops. (Meaning, those I'm not planting lots and lots of plants.) So, on the last Saturday in March, Dana and I went out to the farmhouse and built a 4' x 8' SFG raised bed. I planted 4 squares of onion sets (they were starting to sprout already), 4 squares of lettuce (various types), 2 of spinach, 1 of turnips, and 1 of carrots.On April 3, we spent the whole day working in the farmhouse garden. James built some (hopefully) squirrel- and rabbit-proof cages out of PVC and chicken wire, so I was able to cover my SFG. (Someone had already dug up some of my onions!) I planted 8 squares of cole seedlings (2 broccoli, 2 kale, 2 collards, 2 bok choi -- one seedling in each square) and 1 square of onion seedlings (hoping to get scallions!). Hoping the new cage works.I also planted 246 MORE pea seeds (same kind as last month). And James built a HUGE cage for that plot. (No SFG here!) We didn't have time to finish it, but hopefully we can get back to do that before the seeds come up and the animals eat the seedlings.Okay...back to grading papers. Tomorrow I'll tell you about the flowers and the fruit trees, and maybe even the baby bunnies in Xing Hua's garden. Sigh.
The snow is almost melted, and I am getting started on the garden.Two weeks ago, my first box of seeds arrived -- from Rohrer's Seeds. It took only 2 days from the time I placed my order! At that time, the ground was still covered with snow. Since then, we have had several days of mild weather (highs in the 50s and 60s). Today, the ground is visible, and the small raised bed where I garden in Broomall is actually workable. (Yesterday, I actually saw crocuses blooming here!)So this afternoon, I cleared out the dead tomato and pole-bean vines, stirred up the soil (mixing in the chicken poop from last fall), and planted 240 peas -- 120 garden peas (Early Freezer) and 120 Sugar Snap peas. I have barely made a dent in the half-pound packets I bought. Perhaps I was a bit over ambitious. I'm hoping to get out to the farmhouse and plant a bunch more before it gets warm. We'll see if that happens.
Stupid deer.
Went back out to the farmhouse yesterday to get the last 107 bulbs planted. I know, what an odd number... I had 100 of my little shade bulbs left, and the guys just could not get those last 7 daffodils bulbs planted last week. "We were just so tired!" I learned that they are both very different from me: I don't care how tired I might be or how dark it is...I would never stop with only 7 out of 200 bulbs left! Total bulbs planted this fall: 454. We've barely left summer and I cannot wait until spring! We also decided to pick everything that was left in the garden, since we'll probably get a killing frost before our next trip out. We cut off all the fall lettuce plants, picked all the green peppers, dug up all the carrots, and snipped a bunch of herbs -- parsley, cilantro, and dill (left some of the herbs in case they can go to seed for us). Oh, also pulled the scallion. Yes, I said scallion. We got one. And it's thinner than a pencil. sigh. The only things left are a few turnips.We were pleasantly surprised to find 3 watermelons hiding in the tall grass! Haven't tasted them yet, but I'm hopeful.More things to remember for next year: - If I decide to plant cucumbers again (which I do plan on), I will start my dill very early. It's kind of a drag that the dill came in after the cucumber plants had finished.
- I need to plant way more cilantro.
- I'd like to plant more carrots, too. Wish it weren't so much work to prepare the soil for carrots. Maybe we'll try raised beds next year.
- Lettuce is a very easy fall crop.
- Watermelons need to be started much, much earlier. And probably fed a lot, too.
- Sweet potatoes need to be covered with chicken wire. It seems that bunnies like sweet potato leaves almost as much as bean plants. (Didn't get any sweet potatoes this year.) I've never grown sweet potatoes before...I guess technically I still haven't.
Yesterday, we planted bulbs ... lots and lots of bulbs.
We have an area of the yard at the farmhouse that doesn't grow much grass, so we decided to try naturalizing daffodils there. We found a nice assortment of daffodil bulbs for naturalizing from White Flower Farm in Connecticut and bought 200 bulbs. While we were at it, we bought 200 of another assortment of small, shade-loving bulbs for our shady garden (which has grown pretty much nothing but weeds since 2005). And we threw in some popeye daffodils and red and yellow tulips to plant by the front stairs -- 448 bulbs altogether! Got all but 100 of the small bulbs planted...hope to get to them next weekend.
Using the new bulb planters Dana picked out ... very expensive, but worth it if you're planting hundreds of large bulbs. (I used a trowel to plant the small bulbs.) Petra kept picking up the bulbs and running away with them. I think she thought they were tennis balls.We also discovered that frost comes a lot earlier to Berks County than it does to Delaware County. In Broomall, I still have beans and peppers and herbs coming in, and we don't really expect frost until November. But at the farmhouse, it got cold enough to kill the basil and bush beans. So we picked all the rest of the mature peppers, pole beans, and squash, just in case it freezes harder before we get back. We also found a watermelon in the long grass.Another fun thing I found was a salamander by the front of the house (where I was planting the tulips). I think it's a red-backed salamander. Very cute.
This is the biggest cage, built by James out of PVC and heavy plastic netting. It's where we planted the peas -- has to be tall to let the peas climb and also covered to keep out the birds. Pole beans will go here when the peas are done.
The square foot garden had a lot of cole veggies during the spring. We got one tiny broccoli (head was the size of a ping-pong ball). It looked beautiful one day, but so tiny, so I decided to leave it. Then, when we went back a few days later, it had started to turn yellow. So hard to garden when you're not there every day! Plus, we left it in the car when we got home, so no one got to try it. The chickens liked the two green caterpillars on it, though.
The pak chois were the prettiest, imo. Can't wait for fall so I can grow more. They looked so beautiful one weekend but had bolted by the next. Now I know how big they'll get (not very big) and will harvest them sooner. And plant more of them. We needed three plants to make enough for one dinner. 
(One from my garden, one from Julia's, and one from Xing Hua's.)
